Review: The Body – Christs, Redeemers

While newcomers to The Body may unknowingly allow themselves to be swept up in its opening verse – a beautiful, folk-esque serenade, disturbingly still in amongst a tornado of choirs and rattling fences – frequenters will be waiting for its ethereal turbulence to give way. Sure enough, the choral membrane splits open enough to let The Body’s dirty, lumbering frame to come tumbling in, cycling through a single crumbling riff as the angelic moans thicken into shrill and disturbing screams. It’s an ungainly entrance, with bass frequencies flooding unimpeded through the album’s underbelly and percussive hits spilling between microphones, but this is why The Body’s connection is so ecstatically strong; it’s a juddering, living celebration of formidable impact and amplifier vibration.

Somehow, the duo manage to squeeze further textures in and around the edges of the guitars and drums too: calamitous showers of strings, lightning strikes of electronics, clouds of beautiful falsetto voices and screams that sound like a victim of some sort of horrific, recurrent hallucination. These sounds hang like atmospheric clouds as though The Body’s tectonic activity has conjured its own weather system via the intense friction and gravitational skew, plastered against the constant buzz while simultaneously repelled by its ferocious outward force.

There are brief moments where the guitar distortion begins to quiver, as though crumpling under its own weight – moments where the parallel lines of the powerchord seems to kink and jar against themselves, turning a richly defined chord into an indistinct quake of sound. There are other occasions where a sudden lurch of low frequency seems to knock other instruments out of shape, flattening the drums against its serrated edge and seeping from one side of the stereo frame to the other. Rarely are the unpredictable elements of dirty, downtuned guitar so accentuated, and while many bands can boast a sound that evokes sheer weight and omnipotence, The Body highlight a certain loose and untamed quality that subsumes the guitar’s sound once it departs the moment of initiation; the sacrifice of knowing to the infinite micro-collisions between drone and feedback, producing a sonic object of unforeseen shape.